For the past six months, employees at San Francisco tech company Expensify have enjoyed a special office perk: an upscale lounge that provides them with free specialty cocktails and other beverages. from its 16th– Floor offices where employees can enjoy champagne or draft beer while collaborating in restaurant-style booths or working on their laptops at the bar.
However, the lounge will be closed on November 1st.CEO David Barrett explained this in a note blog post On Wednesday, we’re going to do an experiment.
Expensify, a $215 million company founded 15 years ago that sells expense reporting apps, was already a remote-first company even before the pandemic.It even has an offshore program where employees We can work abroad together It lasts a few weeks every year.
But as the coronavirus pandemic forces millions of people to work from home, Barrett wrote, “We recognize that we are going through a transformational period for the rest of the market and have decided to rehabilitate one of our offices and build around A very simple question: Is there any way to get employees to come back to the office voluntarily?”
The answer, he concludes, is mostly no: “Actually, a break room is a place where people usually visit, marvel, work for a while and then leave.”
Based on the experiment, he believes employees at other companies who currently work in offices “may be going to the office because they feel pressure (from bosses or co-workers) rather than because it’s actually a place they prefer.”
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At Amazon, employees went on strike earlier this year over the company’s demands to return to offices, but under guidance Amazon has seen, managers can now fire workers who ignore the request. Insider last week. Meanwhile, Nike recently updated its return-to-office policy from three days to four days.
However, despite the growing trend of returning to the office, some companies are ignoring the trend. Nvidia, the $1 trillion artificial intelligence giant, offers luxurious office spaces but still lets employees decide whether to use them. Graphic design startup Canva, which was valued at $26 billion last year, has taken a similar approach.
In a recent FlexJobs survey of more than 8,400 U.S. workers, 63% of respondents said remote working remains the most important part of their job to them, above pay and a good boss.
“We will never go back”
Barrett believes there is still a place for offices, but as a society, “we will never go back to the 9-to-5 office culture that is not only a staple of our modern culture but also the basis of most urban planning.”
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan in August to convert vacant office buildings into housing. “COVID-19 has taught us something,” he said. “Whether we want to admit it or not, we are operating under different norms. Everything has changed and we have to be willing to change with it.”
Companies now insisting on sending employees back to the office may need to reconsider, Barrett suggests: “If the best offices in the world can’t compete with the local coffee shop, then the tightly closed Pandora’s box of ‘work from anywhere’ has burst.” .” and will never be resealed. No amount of begging or coercion will work in the long run: the businesses making the demands are fighting a losing war of attrition against unlimited universal energy. “
But he noted that Expensify did get some other benefits from the lounge experiment, such as using it as a lab to test new products and impress potential customers.
As Barrett writes, “It was an incredible brand experience: No matter how luxurious it seemed, from a cost perspective, making a cocktail for someone at our own bar was more expensive than meeting the same person at a conference. Prospective customer conversations are orders of magnitude cheaper than a booth.”
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